Cloud Misconfiguration Is Still the Fastest Way In

Across our engagements, the fastest path to sensitive data is rarely an exploit chain against application code — it's a misconfigured cloud identity or storage resource that was never meant to be reachable from the outside.

The common pattern: a service account provisioned with broad permissions 'to get something working', which never gets scoped back down once the feature ships. Multiply that across a few dozen services and you get a privilege graph nobody has fully mapped.

Benchmarks like CIS and NIST exist for a reason — they catch the boring, high-impact stuff before it becomes an incident. The teams that treat benchmark compliance as a baseline, not a finish line, are the ones we have a much harder time getting into.